Enormous Shark’s Secret Hideout Finally Discovered
 

After half a century of searching, scientists have finally discovered what happens to the world’s second largest shark every winter: It has a Caribbean hideout.

Basking sharks, which can grow up to 33 feet long and weigh more than a Hummer H1, spend the late spring, summer and early fall in the temperate regions of the world’s oceans. But then they pull their great disappearing act, eluding scientists throughout the winter months.

“It’s been a big mystery for the past fifty years,” said Greg Skomal, an aquatic biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and lead author of the study in Current Biology May 7. “For a while people thought they were hibernating on the sea floor, even though hibernating is not really something sharks do.”

Skomal tagged the giant fish off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts and tracked them by satellite, piecing together their mysterious winter wanderings. He discovered the beasts were absconding to the depths of the Caribbean, some voyaging as far as the Brazilian coast, though the attraction of these destinations poses yet another mystery. The findings have implications for conserving the sharks, whose fins are much-desired delicacies in Chinese cuisine.

The basking shark is a benign behemoth. It swims at about three miles per hour with its four-foot-wide mouth gaping open, filtering through almost 500,000 gallons of water every hour for its plankton sustenance.

Like most large fish, they’re difficult to keep track of because they rarely come to the surface, where tags need to be to transmit information to satellites. Skomal got around this hurdle by harpooning the fish with special tags that tracked and stored depth, temperature and light level, which then popped off at a pre-programmed date and rose to the surface. Once a tag hits the surface, it transmits the entire archive of the fish’s journey via satellite. Skomal used a novel analysis technique that could determine the sharks’ locations at every time point, allowing him to retrospectively track them to their secret hiding places.

He found the sharks were traveling well-outside their known range, spending months in the warm waters of the Caribbean and even deep into the southern hemisphere. They also periodically dove to more than 3,000 feet, and often stayed at those depths for months at a time. One shark remained at a depth of nearly 600 feet for upward of five months.

“What they’re doing there — therein lies the mystery,” said Skomal. “If you’re a basking shark you can go to Georgia in the wintertime and be at the right temperature and depth and have plenty of food, so that’s optimal. So why travel three to four times that distance?”
He hypothesizes the trip may have to do with reproduction, another area that has long baffled basking shark researchers.

“No one has ever seen a baby basking shark, no one’s found a pregnant shark, knows when they reproduce or what their gestation period is,” said Skomal.

One possibility, he said, is that the sharks mate in the waters further north, where food and potential mates are plentiful. Then the females may migrate to the deep waters down south, which provide a stable and predator-free environment for the young sharks to grow.

“It’s really hypothetical,” he acknowledged. “We don’t know the genders of the sharks we tagged because we tagged them from the boat. Next time we’ll jump into the water so we can pull down their fly.”

The extended range of the sharks suggests that the different Atlantic subpopulations — near the east and west coasts of both hemispheres — may actually be the same population.

“They might even be crossing into other oceans,” he said, “meaning there might actually be one population in the entire world.”

This possibility has implications for conservation biologists. The sharks are currently listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, due to the high value of their fins which are the key ingredient for shark fin soup, a tasteless but symbolic Chinese delicacy. The sharks’ livers, which can make up 25 percent of their total body weight, also fetch a high price for their oil.

“This tells us that if we allow sharks off British Columbia to be harvested, we might be impacting the entire population,” said Skomal. “We can’t just save the fish off of New England, we have to coordinate with all the fisheries. We have to divide up the pie instead of each having our own pie.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/baskingshark/

really, we just figured this out?...and we still don't know about their mating details?...we should know everything by now!

sharks are cool

why does shark fin soup have to be so good.....damnit.. haha

We know more about space, then we do about our own oceans

I lie Twurtols.....Shwarks.

wow u see the pic on that site?

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wi...501-custom.jpg

jesus

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wi...caloyianis.jpg

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wi.../05/skoma1.jpg

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wi...05/skomal3.jpg

Haha they pretty much said they're just conserving them from Chinese people.
That's one hell of a mouth..I'm assuming they don't eat people? If they do. Those people in the first pic are brave.

teethless sharks don't eat people. People eat people (wait wat?)

sharks are scary regardless.

Basking sharks used to be off the BC coast in reasonable numbers. That was until the salmon fishermen had their way. The sharks tended to get stuck in fishing gear and would ruin nets. So the Canadian government declared them "destructive pests" and started an eradication program. This was during the 1930's and 1940's.

Basking sharks are called 'basking' for a reason. They will sit close to the surface and bask in the sun. They are also very slow moving as the above article states.

The sharks were easy to harpoon, but success at killing them with harpoons was limited. So the government came up with a different solution.

A shark-cutting blade was affixed to the front of a fisheries patrol vessel, the Comox Post. The knife-like ram was even featured in Popular Mechanics in 1956. Over 14 years, 413 basking sharks were rammed in Barkley Sound.

Other fisheries patrol boats were also ordered to ram basking sharks if spotted. The sheer force of the collision would probably kill the sharks. No numbers were recorded, but a deckhand on one of the boats guessed 200 to 300 were rammed during his time on the boat. Many boats were given these instructions.

The media fueled the hatred for the basking shark. The Victoria Times featured a cover picture of a shark with the caption "This is a basking shark, basking and leering. But the smirk will soon be wiped off its ugly face by the fisheries department, which is cutting numerous sharks down to size."

Many more sharks were likely shot at, rammed, or harpooned by people that spotted them. It was all part of the publicly endorsed "War on Sharks."
Fishing for the sharks became popular and Parksville became a popular location. Harpoons were the preferred fishing technique.

By the 1970's the war was over. Once plentiful enough to be sport-fished, the basking sharks had all but disappeared off the BC coast. In the past 10 years, only 6 basking sharks have been spotted. The population has thought to have declined by over 90%.

You can read more about it in Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of BC's Gentle Giants. An exert can be found here:

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/12/07/BaskingSharks/

fucking bitchs hunting these sharks that cant even kill humans

Wow. Thats enough shark fin for at least one full chinese wedding.

Actually there's far worse.

Japanese hunt dolphins as a delicacy.
Meat however, is most tender if its saturated with Adrenaline, which is only released maximally when you're in a "fight or flight" response.
The procedure is to bleed the dolphin to death, alive, to create maximum pain, therefore releasing maximal Adrenaline, to achieve softest meat.
I think killing dolphins is many times worse than killing sharks.

the hell with this harks...i want bin laden's head or cure for cancer......

these probably dont eat meat, they got no sharp teeth, so i guess they go O RLY 24/7 to eat on microorganisms

man that sounds so cruel.....
poor dolphins

man, don't be so quick to defend dolphins.

google "dolphin rape" and you'll see what I mean.

That sounds tasty. Possibly tastier than veal, and veal is damn tasty!

This is off topic, and I don't even know the validity of the facts,

but achiam sounds really well-read and posts some of the most interesting responses around here on RS.

I don't think his intent was to defend dolphins.
But regardless, animals who survive on bare instincts will show aggressive (sexual) behavior. It's not supposed to be uncommon.

i never get this type of comment... were you affected by Bin Laden? or did u just get swindled into the hype of hating someone because some country told you to hate him for what he did almost 10 years ago on the other side of the continent

HAHAHAHA
thats hilarious

I thought dolphin meat was toxic, or at least that is what cbc news was talking about last night